Autochthony and cosmopolitism in Côte d’Ivoire: The longue durée of a globalization conflict (1901-2002)

Karel Arnaut is a researcher at the Department of African Languages and Cultures at Ghent University, Belgium. He has been doing research in Côte d’Ivoire since the early 1990s.

Beyond the primordialist and instrumentalist explanations of the present conflict in Côte d’Ivoire, this seminar offers a historical anthropological reconstruction centred around ‘autochthony’ and ‘cosmopolitism’ as more or less stable discursive formations since the early phases of the colonization of Côte d’Ivoire. Retracing the entangled histories of autochthony and cosmopolitism in 20th-century Côte d’Ivoire enables us to identify the discursive material with which the present conflicting parties construct themselves and their enemies. Such a reconstruction assists an appreciation of the complexity and the many ambiguities of these constructs. Moreover, the identification of the present struggle as an episode in a long-lasting globalization conflict invites us to transcend an exclusively political-ideological or a single-minded economic explanation. The present conflict is not only a product of the pervasive and ongoing globalization of Côte d’Ivoire but also forms the context within which key issues of globalization (such as, again, autochthony and cosmopolitism) are being discussed. Finally, it is argued that such an approach yields possible comparisons with similar developments of autochthony discourses elsewhere in Africa and in Europe.